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Julian Assange's Debut on Russia Today - The Serious People Say it Was Really Bad!

Julian Assange‘s new show “The World Tomorrow” recently debuted on Russia Today (RT) and featured a roughly 30 minute discussion with Hassan Nasrallah. Considering that the reclusive leader of Hezbollah hadn’t given an interview to the Western media in almost 6 full years (i.e. several lifetimes in the media universe) it would at least appear that Assange got something of a scoop: Nasrallah is, objectively speaking, someone with a fair amount of influence in an extremely important and tumultuous part of the world and his views, for better or, far more likely, for worse, carry a lot of weight.

Now perhaps I’m not nearly excitable enough, perhaps my moral outrage sensors aren’t tuned to the right frequency, but I can honestly say that I greeted all of this with a yawn. I make a conscious point of never watching any TV news (helps keep my blood pressure down and my IQ up), I don’t particularly care about either of the interview’s main topics, Hezbollah and Syria, and I generally find RT as a station to be tabloidy, a bit over-hyped, and basically harmless.

It was to my great surprise, then, that quite a lot of people were either snidely dismissive or extremely angry, livid really, about Assange’s foray into journalism.* Based on the content of my Twitter feed, and the fevered denunciations that were flying back and forth across it, I thought that Assange had actually gone out and killed someone, not sat down for a stilted 30-minute conversation with the fat and not terribly intelligent leader of an armed Shiite political movement.

The most insidious aspect of Assange’s show is not what is in it, but what isn’t. Russia Today – now styled RT – is state-owned and Kremlin-controlled. It is remarkable for how little reporting it devotes to what is going on inside Russia today. There is no mention, for example, of top-level corruption, Vladimir Putin‘s alleged secret fortune – referenced in US embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks – or the brutal behaviour of Russian security forces and their local proxies in the north Caucasus…

It’s inconceivable, meanwhile, that RT would interview Doku Umarov, the Islamist leader whose followers are fighting a vicious war in southern Russia, and whom Moscow regards as a murderous terrorist. (When the Australian TV channel ABC interviewed one of Umarov’s predecessors, Shamil Basayev, who was later assassinated, the Kremlin expelled the channel from Russia). Nor is Assange likely to interview leading critics of the Russian regime…

There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, HG Wells and André Gide. So Assange – whether for idealistic reasons, or simply out of necessity, given his legal bills and fight against extradition to Sweden – isn’t the first. But The World Tomorrow confirms he is no fearless revolutionary. Instead he is a useful idiot.

Hardings criticisms are, to put it mildly, a bit odd. First of all, note that he is not criticizing RT for what it is saying, as I’ve said before I don’t think this is particularly challenging to do as the channel is hardly above reproach, but for things that it isn’t saying. This is a basically fruitless endeavor, as you can make the same exact criticism of virtually any media outlet currently in existence on the planet. Why isn’t CNBC constantly writing about corruption and double-dealing on Wall Street? Why isn’t al-Jazeera covering the many depredations of Qatar’s absolute monarchy? Why isn’t In These Times writing about the deeply dysfunctional nature of American labor unions? Why isn’t CNN covering the latest on Kim Kardashian? Oh wait, CNN does cover the Kardashians in extraordinary depth, it just doesn’t cover much of anything else these days. The point of all of this isn’t to laud RT’s rather heavy editorial touch on issues related to corruption and political repression in Russia, it’s to make the obvious point that it’s meaningless, and even a little crazy, to catalog every issue not covered by a particular media outlet. This isn’t a particularly novel observation, but media outlets have owners and those owners would prefer that their mistakes not be aired in public. That’s just how the world works. It’s far more sensible to criticize the things that media outlets actually publish, and given RT’s track record this is hardly an insurmountable task.

Responding to Harding’s second criticism, how is Assange’s refusal to sit down with Doku Umarov the slightest bit damning? Is there a single media outlet in the entire world that does meet Harding’s criteria for objectivity and right-thinkingness? That is to say, are there any media outlets that make a habit of conducting friendly interviews with their own country’s public enemy number one? Did the BBC sit down with the IRA and allow them to calmly explain their grievances against the crown? Does RadioTelevision Espanola go to ETA headquarters and say “hey fellas, how are you all doing? What’s on your mind?” Did NBC get a sit-down interview with Osama Bin Laden? Well, no: the US didn’t send a cameraman and a sound technician to Bin Laden’s compound, it sent a SEAL team to shoot him in the head. And understandably so! Osama Bin Laden was guilty of truly horrific crimes against US citizens and, if the US in any way knew of his location and didn’t target him, but instead gave him a media platform with which to express his views, there would be political hell to pay.

Why would Russia be any different? Why would Russia, of all places, be expected to give a public forum to its most hated foe? I fail to see how “not sitting down with a terrorist who has masterminded the murder of hundreds of your fellow citizens” is a damning indictment of any media outlet’s editorial standards, but perhaps I’ve missed the Voice of America specials in which we cheerfully allow various al-Qaeda functionaries to explain their personal views on jihad. As Harding’s own article admitted Hasrallah had to speak from an undisclosed location because he “spends most of his time underground, dodging Israeli missiles.” Wait, so Israeli isn’t trying to interview Nasrallah, it’s trying to kill him? Yet according to Harding’s own criteria this is supposedly a grave and unforgivable sin: the Israel Broadcasting Authority should be having a friendly tete-a-tete, not sending predator drones!

As for the charge of “useful idiocy,” this is, again, based not on things that Assange has actually said, I have read widely about this whole dust-up and have never seen a single quote of Assange’s that can possibly be considered ‘pro-Kremlin,’ but on things that he’s not said. Assange has never said “Russia’s political system is just peachy, I think we ought to try and emulate it” he has, rather, refrained from openly criticizing it (though not from publishing dozens of diplomatic cables that describe it in extremely harsh terms).

Now refraining from criticism is not laudable, but one only has to look at what the useful idiots of the past did to see how different they are from Assange. Let’s take a Very Serious Person from back in the day, and perhaps the best single example of a “useful idiot,” Walter Duranty. Duranty did not merely refrain from criticizing Stalinism, he affirmatively defended it against its critics in the most public possible way by publishing dozens of utterly false and discredited new stories. Indeed Duranty’s sin was even more serious in that he did not content himself with simply defending Stalin, but went a step further by actively attacking other Western writers who were, accurately, describing the famine in Ukraine. To get an idea of just how rancid Duranty’s conduct was, let’s look at what the New York Times has to say, several decades after the fact, about its most famous useful idiot

Duranty’s cabled dispatches had to pass Soviet censorship, and Stalin’s propaganda machine was powerful and omnipresent. Duranty’s analyses relied on official sources as his primary source of information, accounting for the most significant flaw in his coverage – his consistent underestimation of Stalin’s brutality.

Describing the Communist plan to “liquidate” the five million kulaks, relatively well-off farmers opposed to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, Duranty wrote in 1931, for example: “Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not – they must be ‘liquidated’ or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass.”

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Julian Assange already deserves both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism but looks more likely to be major martyr of the 21st century. He’d be arrested on a trumped-up sex charge if he went to Sweden to collect the first, and arrested for revealling the truth if he went to the USA for the second. Those news media courageous enough to publish his Wikileaks showed us the dishonest and corrupt side of our political world and we are better informed now than we were before, which is as much as journalism can hope to achieve. RT at least allows a great journalist to continue to challenge prevailing orthodoxy.

Disappointed that once again, the larger agencies are playing the ‘Assange is guilty’ card for no logical reason, and are then able to be as disparaging as they like.

Further, so few people have picked up on the confirmation that Al Qaeda are in Syria fighting for the Opposition – if this isn’t an excuse for the US to ‘intervene’ under the banner of the ‘war’ on ‘terror’, then I don’t know what is.

forbes don’t like assange but many do……………..the real issue for forbes is this… what is there to fear from assange? i believe in transparency by governments and assange only published secrets not as geoffrey robinson said recently …top secrets. one interesting fact to emerge from wikileaks is that putin has profited by his leadership and no one wants to know ! assange has no money!

I love RT. Capital Account is a god send. I bet the people of the Soviet Union would have loved an American news agency that had no probelm exposing the corruption of their government and Pravda back in the day. This is why RT is so great. It takes an adversarial approach to American government and American MSM. You can argue that it goes over the top sometimes but they never have any worry about exposing American corruption and hypocrisy which is rampant in this day of the American empire. If you want to no what is happening in America read the foreign press. If you want to what is happening in Russia read the American press. Americans hate Assange because he questions the morality of our rulers and the sheeple identify with their rulers. He exposed our hyporcrisy. For that he will be demonized and hated. The worst thing about the US… particularly its rulers is the narcissitc belief that they alone know the truth and should be dictators to the lesser people of the world. Lebanon, Syria, and Iran do not have the power to stand up to us but have not done our rulers bidding and are currently operating outside of our rules for the lesser peoples. This is why Iraq was broken. This is why Libya was broken. This is why Syria will be broken. It would be very easy to reach a compromise with Hezbollah and Iran but we don’t negotiate with lesser peoples. They either accept their position of inferiority or they face our wrath. Nasrallah is not supposed to be listened to by the Western sheeple. The Iraqi population is not be interviewed and asked what they feel about the past 10 years of occupation. The Afghan people are not to be interviewed about the past 10 years of occupation. The Pakistani people are not to be interviewed about the constant drone bombings. The Palestinian people are not to be interviewed about their living conditions and apartheid like living conditions. The Western sheeple are not to hear the voices of these people at any cost. Because they can not be seen as people. They must be demonized and ignored. They are the untermenchen. Subhumans who deserve our wrath not our sympathy. If they bow down and kiss the kings feet and show their necks and allow our banks into their countries…then maybe we can talk.